Today we worked on a different variation of our baseline/forward placement - our Musical Theater character placement! With this placement, we take parts of our baseline placement to extremes in order to sound more musical theater, and to cater our sound and performance to that of a musical theater song with a strong or subtle character performing it. We use acting techniques with this placement as we treat the song more like a monologue - mapping out how our character would act and/or react to words they are singing (if they're supposed to be happy, spastic, excited, sad, angry). We analyze the way the character should be played - adjust our talking voice accordingly - mapping out our song the same way we would a scene or monologue, with high points and low points.
We then, start to incorporate this new character-like speaking into our song by first, completely talking it out - making sure the energy and voice inflections are what they need to be in order for the character to shine through while we're singing. Then, we slowly elongate certain words and give our song a slightly more melodic feel. From there, we map out how to use our voice inflections to enhance our vocals, and map out the movement that we will use to show each character development point we have chosen (or all the things we have decided our character needs to show in our song). We continued to work on our forward placement, and made sure that Katie is keeping her voice nice and safe with our vocal cord relaxation techniques - adding lots of movement to our warm ups and making sure to vocalize through our mix voice range to take out any tension that Katie has when singing high notes. She did SO awesome!!!